Patience and Creativity and Writing
https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/06/22/rilke-patience-solitude-art/
I would add that scholarly work is creative work, and patience, a quality which I lack, is a foundational characteristics for getting to both. I am coding data today and it is slow work, but I can't make the data say what I want it to. Later I will work on a book and the same is true.
I attended a somewhat fruitless writers fair the other day, but I made some good connections and had good conversations with fellow writers and readers. That is a matter of patience, too. In this day of marketing and sales, where a writer is only validated by her Amazon sales ranking, the patience needed to be a good writer is all the more needed.
I realized Saturday that I should start telling people my primary role professionally is as a writer, and that I support that by being a college administration and faculty. It's a tad pretentious, but I write more than anything I do (emails, assignment critiques, novels, Bible studies, blog posts, journal pieces, faculty evaluation reports) so I really should define myself that way.
I suggest this be the redefiner for other writers. You are a writer if you have written and put it out there for public consumption. It doesn't have to be your primary source of income (which it is for a very small number of people, really).
I would add that scholarly work is creative work, and patience, a quality which I lack, is a foundational characteristics for getting to both. I am coding data today and it is slow work, but I can't make the data say what I want it to. Later I will work on a book and the same is true.
I attended a somewhat fruitless writers fair the other day, but I made some good connections and had good conversations with fellow writers and readers. That is a matter of patience, too. In this day of marketing and sales, where a writer is only validated by her Amazon sales ranking, the patience needed to be a good writer is all the more needed.
I realized Saturday that I should start telling people my primary role professionally is as a writer, and that I support that by being a college administration and faculty. It's a tad pretentious, but I write more than anything I do (emails, assignment critiques, novels, Bible studies, blog posts, journal pieces, faculty evaluation reports) so I really should define myself that way.
I suggest this be the redefiner for other writers. You are a writer if you have written and put it out there for public consumption. It doesn't have to be your primary source of income (which it is for a very small number of people, really).
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